I think of my spiritual state as the closeness of my working partnership with God. To my surprise and delight, I’ve found the best measure of this is how comfortable I am in my own skin. Why? Because the closer my working relationship is with God,  the easier it is to be who I am in the world as it actually is,  and  the less I need to pretend, hustle, prevaricate, bluff, cheat, or waste time feeding my own ego. Living in partnership with God, I can just be a person among other persons, getting on with it. Such simplicity of being is, to me, one of the great gifts of faith.

I think of spiritual experiences as the times I’m fully aware of the presence of God. I acknowledge and possibly envy the spiritual experiences that many religious people have through ritual (in Joseph Campbell’s sense of ritual being one’s passage to the wisdom—the force—behind the ritual). The religious people I talk to really do seem to become as aware as they ever are of God while participating in their chosen religious practices.

Initially, I recognized my own spiritual experiences only retroactively, as a trail of breadcrumbs through my past, designating the path of my growing closeness to God. These breadcrumbs mark the times I was able to relax deeper into faith, accept the great Whatever’s ability to change me for the better, and become less internally complicated and more externally constructive.

My own spiritual experiences stand out as the small miracles of my partnership with the great Whatever. All drunks—of which I’m one—who stay sober experience a moment  in time when we no longer have to drink; something that  has before been impossible. Looking back on the moment I was able not to drink, I now recognize that something in me changed in ways that were beyond my own ability to control or explain. I was able to do something profoundly useful in partnership with some incomprehensible Something that I had been unable to do on my own. The moment I stopped drinking is one of those aforementioned breadcrumbs. In fact, it qualifies as a whole loaf.

Temperamentally I’m rather a flibbertigibbet both physically and intellectually. I couldn’t sit still and meditate myself into an awareness of God if you offered me a free trip to Paris as a reward.  And I’m not interested in dedicating regular blocks of time to participating in rituals that require me to say things  I really don’t believe. But over the years I have developed a continuous low-key awareness of God.   These days, I think I live in a kind of ongoing spiritual state, in that I never not know God is, and is available for partnership with me.

To me, the important part of one’s awareness that God is, is not how one feels because of that connection, but what one does because of it. My father, who was a rather militant atheist, was, however, ethical to the bone. His insistent, loud-mouthed conscience cost him both money and social prestige.  Looking back it seems strange to me that Pop, who was curious about everything else, seemed to have no curiosity at all about the nature or origin of a person’s conscience. His was there, he obeyed its directions to a fault, and that was the end of it. I think he had no interest in exploring the presence of mystery inside himself. Either that, or its presence made him nervous.

I was raised Godless in the Bible belt, becoming such a worrisome heathen by the second grade that my public school class would pray over me. Every Monday morning, my teacher would ask for anyone who had not been to Sunday school to stand so that the class might intercede with the Almighty on our behalf. Every Monday morning, I stood up alone.  I’d asked my father if I could lie by staying seated, and he’d said certainly not, that I was always to stand up for the truth. Always

Standing up for  the truth —literally—was certainly hardship duty for a second grader, but it was the only way my father knew to operate, and for better or worse, we are our fathers’ pupils. The experience toughened me in what I think are good ways, and it also contributed mightily to my growing up curious about the nature and origin of the human conscience—that touchstone against which, according to my family’s tenets, all actions were to be tested. As I got older, I increasingly felt a need to give conscience a name that signified not just what it did, but what it was. So, sorry Pop, in my early forties, I decided that this voice imbedded in me that didn’t seem to be of me, this voice that asks me to relate to my fellow humans in ways unrelated to surviving as one of the fittest, this voice that you, Pop, called your conscience, I would now call God.

I’m not now; nor—God willing—ever will be, conventionally religious—so that particular constellation of spiritual experiences is probably closed to me. In this I remain my father’s rebellious younger daughter, for I have no desire to participate in what I see as any of society’s attempts to conceptualize the Almighty. God is not something I can explain, but is rather something I accept and live with and, like my father, listen to. Unlike my father, I enjoy the presence of Mystery in my life.

Pop’s been dead a decade. I sometimes wonder what he would think now that his younger daughter has come out of our family’s closet as a person of declared faith. I’m sure he’d applaud me for standing up for my beliefs, but I suspect he’d go right on thumbing his nose at God. However, I don’t for one moment believe that the great Whatever, if the great Whatever ever considers such things, would think any less of my father because he never called God by name. We are how we do by each other, after all; and my father did just fine. And to me our doings are the best measure of our spiritual awareness.

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